The coronary artery tree is a system of arteries that supplies oxygen and nutrient-rich blood directly to the heart muscle. When these arteries begin to calcify, or build up fatty deposits along their walls, adverse cardiac events can occur, such as myocardial infractions or coronary artery disease. Proper diagnosis and treatment of these calcifications (also referred to as stenoses or lesions) are critical to reducing the high fatality rate associated with such adverse cardiac events.
Medical procedures, such as cardiac catheterization, generally result in reports created by the performing clinician that detail the procedure, including the diagnosis and the intervention performed. Such reports typically include graphics representative of the coronary artery tree pattern for the patient. Conventionally, the clinician creating the report must manually select an appropriate coronary artery tree pattern that represents the coronary anatomy of the patient. In addition, the clinician must remember the location and quantity of lesions in the patient's arteries or must manually input the lesion data into coronary annotation software.
Conventional imaging systems may include Quantitative Coronary Analysis (QCA) software. A clinician uses the QCA software during a QCA session to measure lesions in a patient's coronary arteries. Conventional imaging systems may also include coronary annotation software that is used to generate a coronary artery tree image for the patient. Currently, the clinician can use the coronary annotation software to only manually annotate the coronary artery tree image with information regarding lesions measured during the QCA session. The results of the QCA session currently cannot be saved and cannot be automatically transferred to the coronary annotation software for display on the coronary artery tree image for the patient. Also, conventional coronary annotation software only offers visual size interpretation of the lesions. In addition, the manual annotation and the visual size interpretation generally occur on different screens and at different times during the clinician's use of the coronary annotation software.